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Hard Drive Makers Slash Warranties
Lucas123 writes "Both Seagate and Western Digital have reduced their hard drive warranties, in some cases from five years to one year. While Western Digital wouldn't explain why, it did say it has nothing to do with the flooding of its manufacturing plants in Thailand, which has dramatically impacted its ability to turn out drives. For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
Yeah, the Maxtor buyout wasn't such a good idea after all, eh?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Maybe it's that with the overhaul the plants needed, the new production isn't fully debugged yet, so the expected failure rate has increased?
Hard drive quality sucks, and almost all of them fail by 5 years so we are cutting back to avoid having to honor the warranty.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since the warranties dont cover lost data, I've never really cared. When a drive fails, its the data that was on it I care about, not the 100$ worth of metal and electronics.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The blacks and velociraptors may or may not be better quality drives (I highly doubt that they are), but you will notice that they are vastly higher PRICED drives - grossly overpriced in fact.. I wouldn't want them even if they were priced the same as the 5400 rpm drives. They run hotter, waste more power, and give a very slight real world benefit to desktops or personal servers.
An excellent point with which I agree, but there is still a problem. If you only warranty a drive for one year, you will see to it that absolutely no engineering or quality control effort is expending to make them LAST for more than one year. This is fully in line with fiduciary responsibility, as well as being common sense.
I have always seen the warranty period as a measure of the confidence the manufacturer has in their quality, which is the ceiling for the confidence *I* have in the manufacturer's quality.
"For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."
Yeah, because standing out as a "quality and support leader" would be a bad thing! If the competition lowers its quality and standards, it's always best to follow them down.
This continued mentality sickens me.
Or maybe they are saying, "we offered a feature that led to higher costs for us but did not see a large increase in sales, and have no confidence that this apparently little-valued feature will convince people to buy our product when our competitors lower their prices due to less warranty overhead."
It would be cheaper and safer to buy 2 Low Cost Hard Drives and Raid them, than buying an expensive Hard Drive wth extended warrantees!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
HDD manufacturers never realized that they had everyone over a barrel. When the Thailand flooding happened, they figured it was a nice opportunity to try some price collusion (triple prices after a 25% drop in production). They never thought it would go so well, and now they're scrambling to roll out similar changes everywhere else, such as dropping the warranty five-fold. Next they will discontinue all the low-end and low-capacity models to "be more consistent with the consumer electronics and technology industries". After that will be to demand a seat on the security council with veto power. Finally, the world. :D I, for one, welcome our hard drive manufacturing overlords. /tinfoil hat.
Daniel
Warranties aren't for data (they don't even try to reclaim data on broken drives) but for the drives themselves. The problem with shorter warranties is it removes the manufacturer's financial incentive to make a product that won't fall apart after 1 year.
The failure rate for hard drives has been quite well known for some time now: it is precisely 100% +/- 0.0%.
Truly, it is not a matter of IF a given hard drive will fail, it is a matter of WHEN.
That means that having a mirrored pair as a minimum -- even on a home machine -- is not an optional frill, it is a necessity.
Uh, RAID is a very bad idea, unless you need 100% uptime (like on a server with hot swap). Broken drives can introduce data errors into the stream, which are eventually duplicated onto the other drive(s) as well. When the file system breaks due to this or some software bug, the file system on all disks is broken. For home use, the much better option is to use the second drive for frequent backups, ideally automated (so you can't forget to do it). The plus side is that the backup drive can be an external drive connected via USB/FireWire/eSATA/Thunderbolt, further decreasing the chance of blowing up both disks at once.
You are the part of the reason everything is so expensive.
This. Drive reliability doesn't save data, backing up data saves data, nothing more and nothing less.
I got here through a series of tubes
They have extremely high fail rates on their "Green" and "Blue" lines of drives. Most "Green" drives are lucky to last 2 years without failing. I personally own 4 of their 2tb "Green" drives, and have had 9 failures and counting (in other words, I have had failures of replacements for replacements...).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
This. Drive reliability doesn't save data, backing up data saves data, nothing more and nothing less.
Except that for most home users who use large harddrives, disk drives are their only way to affordably back up their data. Therefore, it makes sense to purchase more reliable drives for safer backups.
best buy was even surprised by the sound when I returned it
This, right here, is why your experience is an anecdote, not data. You're sick of this brand because of this, but this experience is an outlier in the eyes of someone who has a much larger data set.
Not all drives are created equal, but the way people form their opinions on which ones are crap are highly nonscientific.
honestly the 5 year warranty of some drives greatly affects which drive I buy. I am usually Seagate fan but if a Samsung has better warranty I will buy that instead. I remember when I found one time the drives form Segate I wanted were only 3 year so I bought WD and Samsung at the time. So if WD and Seagate drop their warranty period and other makers keep higher warranty then my cash goes to the bigger warranty. If you don't stand by your product then I have no reason to either.
Jeebus. I think I could actually forgive the misspelling of Seagate (at least you were consistent), but your grammar/homophone abuse kills me: where/were, there/their, buy/by.
I once had a coworker that largely taught himself English from books, newspapers and TV in his home country before moving to the USA. Very smart guy, but made English mistakes like this due to a lack of formal English education (which is difficult to correct as an adult)
This post was quite intelligible despite the grammar/spelling errors, so cut him some slack, you don't know his native language.